Let's Make Testing Fun Again - Noel Rappin

“Programmers Love Writing Tests” is the subtitle of one of Kent Beck’s first articles about Test-Driven Development. I don’t think I’m alone in being drawn to TDD at first because it was fun. The quick and consistent feedback and the ability to turn complicated problems into a series of smaller problems to be solved made TDD development seem more like a game than work.

Eventually TDD became less fun. Slow tests made running test suites a cruel joke. Test code gets bulky, and is hard to refactor because, of course, tests don’t have their own tests.

Let’s fix that. We’ll show some notorious testing joy-killers, like slow tests, hard to read tests, tests that paper over bad designs rather than driving new ones. And we’ll squash them, and regain testing delight.

About the Presenter
Noel Rappin is a Senior Engineer in the Talent Development department at Groupon. Before joining Groupon, Noel was a Senior Consultant at Obtiva, where he lead teams on a variety of web development projects.

Noel has authored five technical books including “Rails Test Prescriptions” and a forthcoming JavaScript book.

Noel has a Ph.D. in Educational Technology and User-Centered design from the the Georgia Institute of Technology, and has taught about web development topics around the country.